The deployment of high quality images to cameras, medical devices, smart phones, tablet computers, and other information devices with screens has grown tremendously in recent years. The wide variety of information devices supporting image processing and image understanding requires the ability to assess images to estimate a blur measurement for a region of input images and to restore the images.
Focal blur, or out-of-focus blur, in images and videos, occurs when objects in the scene are placed out of the focal range of the camera. In many cases it is desirable to remove the blur and restore the original scene faithfully. As objects at varying distances are differently blurred in the images, accurate blur measurement is essential.
The measurement of the focal blur has also become an important topic in many other applications, such as restoring the blurred background part of images and videos, digital auto-focusing systems and 2-D to 3-D image conversion. In an image processing system, such as an optical lens camera, the camera tries to assess whether images is sharp or blur under current lens setting, and tries to find the correct lens setting for the scene.
Thus, a need still remains for an image processing system that can create good quality images with sharp step edges. Such images must be provided across a wide range of devices having different sizes, resolutions, memory capacity, compute power, and image quality.
In view of the increasing demand for providing high quality sharp images on the growing spectrum of intelligent imaging devices, it is increasingly critical that answers be found to these problems. In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is critical that answers be found for these problems. Additionally, the need to save costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures, adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have long been sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.